United States John Williams, Billy Childs, Mussorgsky: Rachel Barton Pine (violin), Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra / Stéphane Denève (conductor). Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, 27.7.2023. (LV)
John Williams – The Book Thief
Billy Childs – Violin Concerto No.2
Mussorgsky (arr. Ravel) – Pictures at an Exhibition
Preceded by a solemn ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ conducted by Board Member Darioush Khaledi, Stéphane Denève bounded on stage and gushed about how excited he was to be making music ‘with your own Los Angeles Philharmonic’. He went on to say that ending with the ‘Great Gate of Kyiv’ was an argument for the proposition that ‘music unites us’; that Billy Childs’s Concerto was written during the pandemic; and how wonderful it was to perform the ‘genius music’ of John Williams.
The short Williams concert suite taken from The Book Thief began with a beautiful, limpid melody sung by oboist Marion Arthur Kuszyk and followed by a lush response in the strings that surges and thrives. A bit of a Romantic piano concerto before the oboe returns was followed by more shifting harmonies in the strings. Turbulence raises a gentle head. The oboe ends it all. Denève bowed in reverence to John Williams who was in the audience, and clasped the score to his heart in tribute.
There was static in one of the speakers but that did not stop Rachel Barton Pine from mounting an assault on the huge, violent dimensions of the Childs’s Violin Concerto No.2. The soloist premiered it a year ago at the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, and was now making her Los Angeles Philharmonic debut with it.
In the program notes, Childs describes the genesis of the concerto with the simplicity artists can experience at that moment of creation when they have found the path they are going to take. ‘Coupling anxiety and depression about the existential threat which COVID presented for humanity with the drudgery of this new, anti-human, social-distanced paradigm we now found ourselves in, I set pen to paper with a few ideas for motifs’. He composed the three movements of the piece in reverse, and whether he deliberately did so, and to what purpose, he does not say. They are called: 1.’Romance/Rejoice’, 2.’Remorse’, 3.’Resilience’.
‘Romance/Rejoice’ began as a series of long-limbed phrases played out through the strings. Above them, Barton Pine spun out her own melody, like Sibelius’s, leading to jazzy interplay between her and the orchestra, and stopped by the brass which allowed all sorts of optimism to appear, especially in the woodwinds. A long dialogue ensued, after which a central contemplative section set the stage for an expanded discourse by the soloist that turned into a long cadenza punctuated by big brass perorations.
‘Remorse’ began with a sour wind choir introducing a violin theme: it felt like the heart of the concerto, sweet, sinking down into trills, and enveloped and developed by the orchestra. A lyrical Barton Pine accompanied by anxious strings found herself in an impassioned duet with the solo cello and then uncontrollably moved towards a triumphant conclusion as a plane buzzed by before a big cadenza.
Resilience began with an big-bang explosion in the drums. There was a brief jazz interlude with the pianist banging away, then Barton Pine returned with some scat violin at increasingly dizzy speeds until a three-minute cadenza was answered by the full orchestra with everything it had, including tons of furious fiddling from the soloist and even a bit more from the piano. Before the composer could make it on stage to be acknowledged, Barton- Pine launched into her encores, which she announced as ‘a little Red Violin for you’: ‘The Chaconne’, ‘Pope’s Gypsy Cadenza’ and ‘Pope’s Concert’.
Denève conducted Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with directorial energy and glee, issuing dramatic commands that at their most athletic were bam-wow-kazam strokes of power and panache out of a graphic novel, like he was orchestrating the whole thing himself. Although the camera angles on the screens flanking the stage were limited, it was fascinating to see the evening’s concertmaster, Nathan Cole, and the principal cellist, Robert deMain, hard at work, to see down the row of woodwinds and get glimpses of what a row of low brass instruments looks like when they are blowing full throttle.
Laurence Vittes